In the midst of massive corruption, persistent landlessness, rock-bottom wages, and skyrocketing prices of basic goods, the US-Marcos Jr regime has nothing better to do than police and penalize legitimate dissent. Over the past years, with the ever-increasing role of the internet and social media in shaping political discourse, the reactionary regime has taken to online spaces to extend its control over the Filipino people.
In early January, the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) released a draft circular mandating social media account registration, ostensibly to combat cyber-crime. The proposal requires all accounts on all social media platforms to be linked to a registered SIM, effectively doing away with online anonymity. DICT’s move was followed by the Cybercrime Investigation and Coordinating Center’s call, on February 10, to block Signal, a messaging application claiming that it is used for “spoofing” (considered a cyber-crime where the identity of a person or entity is disguised to access vital information. Both maneuvers received widespread condemnation from digital rights groups, citing its implications on privacy and freedom of expression.
We only need to look at the SIM Registration Act to see that policies of this sort are entirely ineffective at their supposed goals. In the years since the implementation of SIM registration, text and call scams have only proliferated. What was actually reduced was mobile access for Filipinos, evident in the termination of over 50 million cellular connections between 2023 and 2024. The US-Marcos Jr regime was also able to establish a mechanism to monitor communication and internet activity of the general population everything from personal messages to browser history to location of registered individuals can now be tracked. Requiring social media account registration only extends surveillance further into the digital world.
It should be no surprise that the DICT s move to mandate social media account registration comes after a recent surge in pro-NPA sentiments on social media earlier this year. As the US-Marcos Jr. regime has utterly failed in covering up its own corruption and abuses, it is now scrambling to control and clamp down on dissent online.
This move to clamp down on online dissent and use cellphones for intelligence and surveillance is further confirmed by the NTF-ELCAC’s National Action Plan for Unity, Peace and Development (NAP-UPD) that came out on May, 2025. Hellbent to dominate the information environment both on online and offline platforms and to gather timely and accurate intelligence, this action plan uses public resources to fund the AFP’s Cyber Command and the NTF-ELCAC’s troll farms despite popular appeals to give bigger shares of the budget to agricultural production and social services.
The reactionary regime’s intensifying counterrevolutionary efforts are geared towards monitoring and persecution of activists, revolutionaries and the restive populace in general, under the guise of curbing cyber- crime. Millions of Filipinos are disenfranchised from basic services. The reactionary state now also has the means to spy on and restrict the internet access of those suspected of harboring progressive and revolutionary sentiments. The trend towards establishing a surveillance state are unmistakable.
Alongside popular campaigns to address pressing economic and political issues, revolutionary forces are challenged and enjoined to combat these more insidious methods of the reactionary state to curtail and silence opposition. ###
